How to Leverage 5G with Cloud Gaming – PlayGiga Case Study by Intel®

Much like music and TV in the past, gaming is now moving swiftly to the cloud as 5G promises to create new uses cases and enable gaming anytime, anywhere, on any screen. This requires addressing tuning and optimization of network components to maximize performance, grappling with latency to enhance the unique responsiveness of gameplay, and ensuring that operational costs and capital expenses are managed effectively.

PlayGiga needed to provide its customers with a reliable and cost-effective way to bring cloud gaming to the masses. This case study explains how PlayGiga leveraged Intel’s ecosystem–including 5G expertise, high-performing chipset, and cost-effective scalability–to create a platform that meets the needs of telecommunication companies (telcos) and communication service providers (CoSPs) to offer gaming-as-a-service (GaaS) to their customers.

The challenge was to develop a platform that would:

Create a new gaming market: PlayGiga needed a GaaS solution that would enable CoSPs and telcos to build a new revenue channel, create sticky services for their customers and grow their markets.

Ensure responsive gameplay: The challenges to providing satisfying gameplay over the cloud requires a reference architecture for the visual cloud that is capable of handling heavy workloads, compressing rich media content efficiently, and accommodating high numbers of users without service slowdowns.

Leverage the possibilities of 5G: Rapidly evolving network technologies— including 5G—create a push for unique services that help a brand gain recognition and differentiation in a densely-packed marketplace. PlayGiga needed a partner that understood 5G and could help shape technologies to take advantage of it.

The solution that PlayGiga chose was Intel’s Visual Cloud platform to deliver:

High end compute and graphics performance on a single chip: The 8th generation Intel® Core™ i7 processor with Radeon™ RX Vega M Graphics delivers excellent performance for gaming workloads.

Low OpEx and latency: Using the Intel chipset has been shown to reduce OpEx.1 Reducing OpEx can create a profitable business case for CoSPs and telcos with the low latency responsiveness that gamers expect.

5G know-how: CoSPs and telcos are looking for ways to monetize their 5G investments and cloud gaming is one answer. Intel’s 5G expertise provided PlayGiga the fundamental components to create their service offering.